Hi! I'm Patricia. Unless the site gets hacked, all entries are written by me. Which is said neither with a whole lot of pride nor much embarrassment. Like many a personal blog, the entries revolve around me. And let's face it, if you can't be vain on your own blog then where can you be vain? All to say, if you're looking for the latest on world news, celebrity gossip, or the next election, this probably isn't where you wanted to be. But thanks for stopping by! A little more about me...

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

It’s late (10 p.m.) and it’s a “school night” as they say and I need to be at work earlier than usual so despite having this desire to dive into a longer post about my relationship with food I think I’ll - wait for it - table that for now. I’d say I’m sorry about that except I don’t want to lie to you. Had to be done. But back to the food. For now, I’ll just share that after four years of not having a kitchen to myself it’s nice to be able to make my own messes without feeling self conscious about my lack of cooking skills. The ex-roommates were great in a myriad of ways, including their very fancy and enviable cooking skills. So cooking there never felt all that comfortable for me.

And the photo above should give you a sense of why. I tend to overcook pretty much 90% of what I make. I can follow a recipe okay but once it’s time to pull the thing off the heat, out of the oven, that’s where things fall a part a bit. You’d think, with the advent of timers, that the guesswork would be minimal. But I get distracted or I underestimate how long I can let something sit while I finish that page in a book, that last paragraph in an article or wait until I can come to a good spot in the show to hit pause.

But, whether it’s a desire to get a handle on the weight (again, always) or a wish to live like a “grown up” (which apparently in my head means not burning things. Hey, it’s the attainable goals) or the knowledge that hopefully one day in the not so distant future I’ll be cooking for a little person, I have this idea that this year will be the year that I master cooking. And by master it, I mean finding simple recipes that are idiot proof enough for me to build a nice repertoire of things I can pull together without feeling like I’m preparing for an advanced calculus final.

We’ll see how that goes. If nothing else, it’ll give me content for the blog. Because, you have your choice of blogs where people post photos of all the beautiful dishes they create but where can you go to make yourself feel better about the fact that you had dry cereal for dinner for the third night in a row? Don’t act like you don’t. This truth thing has to flow both ways, you know.